Budget season is all about priorities: what does Ottawa need to maintain and improve the city’s quality of life?
That’s the task city councillors faced as they muddled their way for months towards a $2-billion budget for 2005, debating details great and small.
Councillors debated everything from money for the arts to snow clearing to the library, yet one group was allowed to walk out of City Hall with a budget that seemed almost criminal — the police.
The police budget sailed right through with nary a protest from our elected representatives. The cost? Around $164 million, more than an eight-per-cent chunk of the city’s budget pie.
Moreover, this year’s police budget was a whopping 10 per cent more than 2004.
How could this pass so easily?
The biggest problem with the police budget is city council cannot tinker with it: it either accepts or rejects the numbers proposed by the police.
The Ottawa Police Services Board, which sets the budget, is under provincial — not municipal — control, even though it’s local tax dollars that fund the police.
That must be changed. The City of Ottawa should have jurisdiction over the board, allowing for complete control over the police budget. If the police board uses our tax dollars, then it should be accountable to us.
But even though council can’t tinker with the budget, it can protest. Last year, city council pressured the police to cut about $2 million out of their $151 million budget because councillors felt that number was too high.
There was no such protest this year, even though money had to be taken out of the municipal reserve fund at the last minute to drop the tax hike to just under four per cent.
Instead of scrambling to find savings and potentially threatening our long-term financial stability, those savings should have been found in the immense police budget.
The police serve a vital function in any community and need a constant cash flow. And to be fair, most of their budget covers salaries, which were just increased thanks to a recent provincial ruling.
But when areas such as ambulance service, public transportation and street repairs have to scratch and claw for every penny from overwhelmed city councillors, it is outrageous that police can walk out with a relative fortune.
City council has asked Chief Vince Bevan to restrict his budget increase to three per cent next year, but there’s nothing compelling him to do so. Our local police force should be accountable to locally elected politicians.
Councillors should be able to lop off significant parts of the police budget just as they do to virtually every other funding area. It’s only fair.
— Joel Kom